Please become my Patron! It's super-easy; see Patreon to find out how. -Now, don't worry; everything will remain free to read here, (many of my readers do not have credit cards, after all). But I'm a full-time cartoonist and I need to pay the bills. There are hundreds of folks reading, so those who are able, please consider chipping in with as much or as little as you choose. Even a buck a month would be a blessing! Those of you who have already extended your support, oh my goodness, Thank-You! It literally means the world to me!

Also.., Jenny Mysterious is now LIVE and will have regular weekly updates!Yessss! Been a long time coming. Jump to her section below. Thanks everybody!

-No DRM -No Hassles -Super High Quality -Whole Books with all the extras!

Technical note: I'm using a new sales system for this which doesn't require all kinds of complicated filling out of forms and such. The back-end magic is worked by Gumroad, an awesome new on-line system designed just for digital content; easy payment, reliable delivery, no mucking around. -And holy smokes! They play fair, taking 5% + 25 cents per transaction. Are you paying attention Apple and Amazon? This is how it's done.

NEW! Stardrop eBookNow Available!(See the Studio News (below) for the scoop on this!)

I've decided to publish the long-talked about Jenny Mysterious free on-line, with new pages every week, starting right now! BUT I am asking folks to become Patrons. Please support my comics with as little or as much as you choose with a monthly subscription, (even just a dollar would be fine!). It's really easy. See my Patreon page for details.

Thieves & Kings is not a webcomic. It's an all-ages fantasy/adventure graphic novel series which I've been working on since 1994. It is nearly done; I hope to wrap up the story in the 7th volume, (currently in production). The chapter featured here offers a good example of what it's like to read Thieves & Kings. --It's a peppy sequence, and it contains both regular comic pages, and some text pages. It doesn't show much of the title character, (Rubel) and none of the Shadow Lady, but Heath and Varkias carry the show quite nicely. I do hope you enjoy this sample of my work!

The Walking Mage is a complete story. Originally it was done in black & white, (which you can check out here, if you like). I wanted to experiment with color and so began by using a computer to color the Walking Mage for its print release. After a few panels I decided that it would be a lot more fun to paint it by hand, and so switched to water-color around episode six.

The story itself is quite a good little yarn; funny and pointed in many places, as political satire ought to be. I was actually quite surprised to learn this! I found myself laughing out loud in several places. --I don't know why this story in particular was so hard for me to accept, but it was. I avoided reading it for several years after it first went to press. The ending is rather abrupt, but it was a serial strip, after all.

So anyway, after having let this web-comic languish in the digital attic, I've decided to pull it out and post it again for all the world in its full-color glory. This is the first time the Walking Mage has been available in full color on the web. I hope you enjoy the adventures of Quinton and Varkias. Cheers!

You might think, "Yeah, I know what you mean. After all, there's no such thing as too many books! Just too few shelves. Ha ha!"

Hm.

How do I put this...

Unless you run a comic shop or a book store, (or a publishing company), then you're probably in a different weight class from me. Literally.

When I moved from Ontario to Nova Scotia 13 years ago, I was worried about being pulled out of traffic by the Truck Cops to weigh my big rental moving vehicle. I was fairly certain that I was over the limit since the wheel well frames were weighted down so that they were almost scraping the tops of the tires. The limits are measured in tons. And come to think of it.., I don't really understand where this practice came from or why. They actually have giant scales on the side of the road and you roll your truck right onto them and the border people weigh you. Until I was worried about breaking Truck Law, these weigh sites had always been invisible to me.

But there I was, idling in a line of other trucks beside a giant truck scale wondering if the man with the reflective jacket and authority hat was going to signal me over for a friendly freight-weighing. (He didn't. I guess having the words "Budget Rental" on the side of your ride puts you beneath their concern. It's not like I had 18 wheels under me.)

Anyway...

I have to move soon because.., rent hikes are a reality. Mine is about to double, bringing it into line with the rest of the town. I've been living on borrowed time, it seems, and Wolfville has in the years since I moved here become a rising star, its shine attracting money and people with money to limited housing options so that rents are now about the same as one would find in a major metropolitan center. I can't afford this town anymore.

I don't know yet how far away I'll be going, but my options are severely limited by the raw tonnage of books I have in my life.

Oh...! If I could only walk away from them all, then these sorts of challenges would be easy!

-Well, *easier*, anyway. I'm not quite duffel bag guy, (I'd LOVE to be duffel bag guy!!! I could go anywhere! I could use my new passport and go somewhere else entirely! I want to do that!) but I'm not duffel bag guy. I could probably get by with just a large car trunk and back seat. The only things I'd really need to take with me are some clothes, some bits of computer gear and a couple of huge and heavy boxes of old artwork, (which I'd also kind of like to leave on a doorstep some days, to be perfectly honest. Who knew being a cartoonist would make me feel ankle-chained?)

But I need to be realistic. Making comic books is what I do, and there are penalties you just have to live with. I accept this. Just not all of it!

Now, a lot of the books I hauled from Ontario are gone. That's pretty good for a publisher to be able to say. I moved here with about 120 boxes (at a little over 20 kg each, making for approximately 2.5 metric tons), and today I only have about 40 of those original boxes left. Keen. -And most of *those* are T&K Volume #4, which I heavily over-printed. All of the earlier books are either gone or down to the last hundred copies.

-Which was an alarming state of affairs. I wasn't financially able to go back to press old copies. With this concern in mind, when I pressed Volume #5 of Thieves & Kings, I decided to waaaaay over print. It's a lot cheaper to print an extra one or two thousand copies than it is to go back for a second printing. You save thousands of dollars that way. So.., I waaaaaay over printed.

Today, including Stardrop and other projects, I look around me and realize that I *still* own approximately 2.5 metric tons of books! Dammit. -And half of them are #5's, -which are pretty much dead weight until I get T&K all finished up, and even then...

So the point of this post is this: I've decided that I need to get rid of about a ton of books!

It's sad, because one day I'm sure I'll be looking back and thinking, "Dammit, Mark! You're nearly out of volume #5 and you could really use that extra 1000 copies you pulped!" But that day is not today, and I need to lighten up and move and fit into wherever I find myself.

I looked up the paper recycling plant. If I can truck my books over there, they'll take them off my hands for 7.7 cents per kg. So I'll spend about $80 un-printing a book in order to shed weight. That's one solution. And I still probably need to rent a van or get somebody with a pick-up truck to help.

If anybody out there can think of another, better way to move 1000 copies of a 5th book in a series -a way which doesn't cost anything, I'd love to hear it. (Shipping or mailing that many books would be a multi-hundred dollar expense, so any donations or similar solutions need to be pick-up/drop-off only. -Or, I suppose, where somebody else is excited enough by the idea to want to pay for shipping. 1000 books would cost around $300-$500 to send via ground courier.)

So...

Any ideas?

Also... where should I move next? I have a few months to think about it...

Any provinces, cities or towns out there want a resident cartoonist? I bring a lot to a community!